Discussions on Legacy materials 3 (DiLegMa 3)

Paris Institute for Advanced Studies

Hôtel de Lauzun, Paris

April 16-17th

This conference is the third of the DiLegMa series, after editions hosted in Paris in 2024 and in Bern in 2025. The conference aims to bring together descriptive/documentary linguists who engage with legacy materials on their language (or language group) of specialization. Hosted by Université Paris Cité's Histoire des théories linguistiques research group, the conference will provide opportunities for exchange with historians of linguistics, and its themes are therefore situated at the interface of these subdisciplines of linguistics.

For linguists involved in language description and documentation, the multiple crises of the last few years have in some cases made access to field sites difficult. This has often led to a renewed interest in exploring earlier descriptive materials— Legacy Materials — as objects of study in their own right, and/or to complement field data collected in person. Legacy materials frequently pose interpretational challenges for present-day linguists. Some reasons for possible difficulties in retrieving and/or reconstructing the original intent and context of the materials may include the following: incomplete or missing metadata; unfamiliar terminology, ontological systems, frameworks; challenging presentation styles and typographies.

Notwithstanding the difficulties in accessing and engaging with them, these materials can often be treasure troves of insights about the people and times which produced them, and contribute in a tangible way to our understanding of earlier practices around collecting and producing linguistic data. Additionally, Legacy Materials may contain data which can provide insights for diachronic work; otherwise inaccessible lexical data; textual materials in registers or genres missing from the contemporary corpus; morphological data necessary to complete paradigms. At the meta-grammaticographical level, these resources can possibly inform us about, among other things, earlier data collection methodology, the development of data annotation and glossing practices, the evolution of grammatical categories and their interrelations, approaches to language description, and the changing role of the various subfields of linguistics in descriptive work, among others.

The conference will be held April 16th and 17th 2026 in the magnificent Hôtel de Lauzun, home to the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies (https://www.paris-iea.fr/fr/l-institut/l-hotel-de-lauzun).

Interested participants are invited to treat any aspect of the recovery, rehabilitation and reuse of legacy materials.

Please submit an anonymized 1-page (maximum) abstract by January 30th, 2026 to https://dilegma3.sciencesconf.org/user/submissions.

We gratefully acknolwedge funding from the Empirical Foundations of Linguistics InIdex project.

Selected bibliography

Austin, Peter K. 2021. Language Documentation and Language Revitalization. In Olko, Justyna & Sallabank, Julia (eds.) Revitalizing Endangered Languages. A Practical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199–219.

Austin, Peter K. 2017. Language documentation and legacy text materials. Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 11, 23–44.

Austin, Peter K. 2013. Language documentation and meta-documentation. In Jones, Mari & Ogilvie, Sarah (eds.) Keeping Languages Alive: Documentation, Pedagogy and Revitalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3–15.

Conathan, Lisa. 2011. Archiving and language documentation. In Austin, Peter K. & Sallabank, Julia (eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 235–254.

Dobrin, Lise, and Schwartz, Saul (eds). 2021. Special Issue on the Social Lives of Linguistic Legacy Materials. Language Documentation and Description 21.2

Lahaussois, Aimée. 2023. (De)Coding Hodgson's Kiranti Grammars and Verbal Paradigms. Bhasha. Journal of South Asian Linguistics, Philology and Grammatical Traditions, 2 (2), 319–362.

Lukaniec, Megan E. 2018. The elaboration of verbal structure: Wendat (Huron) verb morphology. Dissertation, UC Santa Barbara. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2ss758h8

Weber, Tobias. 2023. Internal and external social dimensions of linguistic legacy materials: the case of Kraasna South Estonian. Dissertation, LMU München: Faculty for Languages and Literatures. Retrieved from https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen .de/31860/